


it's funny how, when you come around

by perpetualskies



Series: lindo a crescer [1]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M, New Beginnings, POV Second Person, if you still need to process your football feelings from like one and a half years ago, oscar left for football not for money, ot3s are a question of when not if, you’ve come to the right place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-13 18:32:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14754081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perpetualskies/pseuds/perpetualskies
Summary: It’s a small miracle, the way you find and split your hope amidst each other.





	it's funny how, when you come around

**Author's Note:**

> David signed a five year contract to move from London-based club Chelsea and join Thiago at Paris Saint-Germain in June 2014. He moved back two years later, in August 2016. After a little more than four years with Chelsea, Oscar signed for Shanghai SIPG, and made his first appearance for the club in February 2017. All three of them were starting members for Brazil's squad during the World Cup 2014 in Brazil.
> 
> "Nobody cares about these pairings any longer!" is apparently my cue to roll up my sleeves and get right to it. If you still DO, please come talk to me about them!
> 
> Title from Angus & Julia Stone's "My House Your House."
> 
> DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction and means no disrespect towards the parties depicted within. Please do NOT share this with the players or anyone associated with them, or repost this work anywhere else.
> 
> Constructive criticism is always appreciated. Comments are love ❤

Paris churns out a darker autumn than you were prepared for, loses itself in the slipstream of an underwhelming summer, traps you in a maze of rain-slick parapets and the occasional subsisting bookstand, the washed-out faces of the Parisians inching along in the inner-city traffic.

Your love wears itself out, rubs itself thin against the stands of Parc des Princes, against the colder days where you can’t seem to make yourself leave the house, where Thiago doesn’t seem to be able to do so either. That’s what you tell yourself. That’s how you pinpoint the aftertaste of desire. Something stings through the hours and hours you two have amassed, through all the joy and sweat and desperation of a mutually accumulated past. You still remember the first time he’s held your hand, the first time he told you about Russia and how utterly terrified he had been, the first time you knew that he wanted you, the first time you knew that you wanted him too; but it dulls and dulls against the rain and cold and general bleakness that draped itself over the city that you now seem to share before anything.

You never meant for it to go this way, but when the call comes you can’t refuse. In the end, you never find out who Thiago heard it from first, and you’re too ashamed to ask. Thiago drives you to the airport because that’s the unspoken way between you, and for a moment you wish that it weren’t, that he’d be cruel, or unjust, or make it any way less easy to come back.

 

It’s easy enough when Oscar comes to see you at the hotel, easy when he stays and lets you rearrange his body beneath yours, easy when his sweat and skin and the redness of his lips still taste just the same. Outside, you’re put on the spot, are made clear that this is _not_ a homecoming, far from it. They knocked 20 million off your net worth and still you came and this is what you have to prove yourself against. Oscar doesn’t ask, offers his mouth against your mouth, his hips against your hips, the frail bend of his waist, the entire damning curvature of it. If only you could give back as much.

When you receive the keys to your own apartment, and, subsequently, start spending all your time at Oscar’s place, certain realities become less easy to ignore. He has started reading in English, you realise, is not afraid to order food any more, not even on the telephone. His house has become warmer, more like him in every way. You trail your fingers over the blankets, cushions, cookbooks, DVDs, the pictures of him with people whose first names you don’t remember. You find two t-shirts of yours, folded amidst his own; you never knew he had them. You notice a quietness you used to tease him about when you saw it directed at others, the one that always fell away the moment he would turn to you. Oscar is too quiet when he curls against you at night, too quiet when he slips out in the morning. The fact that he starts slipping out in the first place.

It takes you just a little bit too long to realise that he’s not _quiet_ , not really, that he’s self-contained, confident, not as much in need of you as you’d imagined him to be. You’re a fool to have ever expected otherwise, a fool to realise so late that this is not how you make him stay. You tell yourself it couldn’t have been _just_ you, but the timing speaks for itself, the way he could have chosen Atlético, or Italy, and didn’t. It’s almost comical that Oscar is the one to spin out first, Oscar who plants eight time zones and the entire Chinese Super League between you, Oscar who refuses to have a stake in this. Oscar who says, “You two need to sort this out,” as if it weren’t the three of you in this together. There’s nothing left to sort out, of course, just you and the way you’re grappling under the lights at Stamford Bridge, surrounded by the wrong shade of blue.

 

For months, you get stuck in the wrong timeline, catching yourself flipping through the wrong memories. You’re left with the fading softness of this boy who you never even asked to stay, or maybe you did, but in all the wrong ways, this boy who used to breathe and lean and fall against you, who used to leave the sweetest taste on your tongue. You and Thiago manage not to talk for six months, six months before it fades out and glazes over, this thing between you, six months before you wake up and think that it wasn’t anyone’s fault, not really.

Thiago picks up on the first try, and what can you say but his name, over and over again, until your voice cracks and he tells you to stop, once again the kinder of you two. Here’s a reverie of unspoken things between you, here’s your guilt fanning out, here’s where you blink fast against how it all started, two boys in a yellow-and-green jersey unable to believe their luck. Then Thiago mentions it so casually, so obviously unaware, something you once again can’t really get angry at, albeit not for lack of trying. How foolish of you to have ever thought otherwise: that out of the two of you, you’d be the last to touch him, the last to see him go. How easy to picture it now: Oscar arranging for a stopover in Paris, arranging for his body to press into Thiago’s, for his scent to carry over into a city that has already turned the page on you.

You didn’t know this, and it comes up acidic while you both wait out the silence.

“He left,” you say finally, as if only just believing it.

“So did you,” says Thiago.

 

It takes you a while to realign yourself with the current of the city, with what you came here to do. Takes you a while to get used to a different crowd, a different line-up, a different kind of belonging. You meet the city headfirst. You challenge yourself to learn something new about it everyday. You take the tube because you genuinely love to do so. On your days off, you take a different line every time, getting off at random stops and walking, walking, walking. You stop for selfies, strong coffee, the way the river deflects the winter light across the city. Find the best _pastéis de nata_ in all of London. You send a snap of them to Thiago. And to Oscar.

You take up new routines, channel through them a newfound commitment. You start calling Oscar, every week at the same time, listening to him fall in love with football all over again, listening to him fall asleep, listening to the small traces of a different life, spun so far away from you. You call Thiago too, spend hours reconstructing the ache you felt for each other in the first place, remembering how much you were willing to just _wait_ , to curb your want and spread the longing thinner than a snowflake. You call him at night, curled up with one of the many books Oscar left you. Call him when you’re not sure what to get for his mother’s birthday. Call him just to tell him that you love him. Then the call-ups come, and you all breathe a collective sigh of relief, split threefold between London, Paris and Shanghai. You pack your suitcase way too early. You can’t wait.

 

You’ve got two and a half days to acclimatise and you’re thankful for every minute of it. Thankful for the moment of hushed silence between you and Thiago while you still hear the shower running, thankful for two single beds pushed together, for the way Oscar blushes when you ask him to say something in Chinese, thankful for falling asleep last, with Oscar’s head in your lap and Thiago curled against your shoulder, his reading glasses by the bedside. Thankful for _cafuné_ , the ever changing ways to fit your bodies together, thankful for just that: together, at the same time, in the same place. Thankful for not having to talk, not yet. Thankful for every drawn out syllable that rings of home, the way Thiago angles your head to kiss you, for Oscar looking so unabashedly young again, for the way you both look at him and then at each other.

It’s a small miracle, the way you find and split your hope amidst each other. There it is, angled against the sunlight, dragged out and shaky, calling you by your lover’s name. There it is, reaching for you in the half-dark. There it rises like a question, there it slips into a promise, there it hides against your chest. There it steals another t-shirt from you, and finds that you don’t mind at all.

Tomorrow night this hope will board three different flights, will re-emerge jet-lagged and tugging at three different time zones. Tonight it presses close, makes for the sweetest kiss goodnight.

 

 

 


End file.
